The US Open draw is out and nobody knows who wins it

On Thursday afternoon in New York, somebody pulled 128 names out of order and the whole autumn changed shape. That is all a Grand Slam draw is: a piece of admin, a few minutes of ceremony, a sheet of paper. And yet for the next two weeks that sheet decides who plays whom, who gets the kind opener and who gets the nightmare, whose summer ends in tears on an outside court on the first Tuesday.

Most years you can look at the draw and see the ending from here. Not this one. The 2026 US Open starts on Sunday 30 August without the best player in the world, with a defending champion who has not played a competitive match since April, with a first-time major winner carrying the top seed and a 39-year-old still hunting the record that will not come. On the women's side there is a champion chasing a piece of history nobody has touched in more than a decade, and a bottom half of the draw so heavy it looks like a mistake.

If you love watching tennis but have never held a racket in anger, this is the good kind of tournament. Nobody can tell you what happens. Here is what to look for.

The man who is not there

Jannik Sinner will not play. He announced it on 21 August, and the language was the flat, careful language players use when they are trying not to cry in public: he had been back on court in Monte Carlo, he had worked with his team and his medical staff, and the right knee still needed more time.

The knee has been quietly ruining his summer since Wimbledon. He beat Alexander Zverev in the final at the All England Club to defend that title, and then he simply stopped: no Canada, no Cincinnati, no warm-up matches, nothing. For a player whose whole method is repetition and rhythm, arriving in New York on zero match play was never realistic, and he ran out of road.

The scale of it is easy to miss. Sinner won this title in 2024 and lost the final here last year. He has played every Grand Slam since he made his major debut at the US Open in 2019, through every kind of difficulty. This is the first one he has missed. The world number one will spend the fortnight watching, like you.

You feel his absence everywhere in the men's draw. Take out the person who has won or reached the final at almost every hard-court major of the last three years and the whole thing loosens. Seeds move up. Sections that would have been somebody's death sentence become somebody's opportunity. Half the locker room has quietly recalculated.

Alcaraz, back from four months in the dark

The defending champion is here, which is more than anyone expected in June.

Carlos Alcaraz hurt his right wrist in April at the Barcelona Open. He finished the match, won it 6-4, 6-2 against Otto Virtanen, and pulled out of the tournament the next day. Then came the part players hate most: the waiting. He missed Roland Garros. He missed Wimbledon. He missed Cincinnati. On 20 August he announced he would come back in New York, at a Grand Slam, in front of 24,000 people, defending a title, having not played a competitive singles match in four and a half months.

That is either magnificent or reckless, and we will find out which by the middle of next week. He is seeded second and opens against Roman Safiullin, which sounds routine and is not. They have met twice and split the two matches, and the one on a hard court went to Safiullin, in Paris in 2023. If your wrist and your timing are anything less than perfect, a big, clean, flat hitter is exactly the wrong first problem to be handed.

The Spanish press took one look at the rest of his quarter and used the phrase death draw. Ben Shelton, who won the Canadian Open this month, is seeded to meet him in the quarter-finals. And Novak Djokovic is in the same half, which means a potential semi-final that would sell out the stadium twice over.

If you want a single reason to watch the first week, it is this: the sport genuinely does not know how much of Alcaraz has come back. Neither does he. You can read the story of his season, injury and all, on his player page.

Zverev at the top, at last

At the top of the sheet, for once, is Alexander Zverev.

He won Roland Garros this year, his first major after all those years of being the best player without one, and in doing so became the first man other than Sinner or Alcaraz to win a Grand Slam since 2024. He also lost the Wimbledon final to Sinner. That is a strange, top-heavy season: one enormous breakthrough, one enormous near-miss.

Now he arrives in New York with the number one beside his name, which brings its own weight. He opens against Lorenzo Sonego, a proper competitor on a fast court and not the gift a top seed hopes for, and is projected to meet Alex de Minaur in the quarter-finals, a man who returns everything and turns matches into endurance tests in exactly the humidity Zverev likes least.

Zverev has reached a US Open final before and lost it from two sets up. He has been coming here for a decade with the same set of gifts and the same set of doubts. The difference this time is that he has finally proved he can close a major out. Watch how he handles being the one everybody else is measuring themselves against.

Djokovic, 39, still counting

And then there is Novak Djokovic, seeded fourth, ranked fifth, 39 years old and one Grand Slam short of the number that would put him alone at the top of the sport forever. Twenty-five majors. He has been stuck on 24 for long enough that the chase has become its own genre of tennis writing.

He is not finished, whatever the internet says. He reached the Australian Open final in January, beating Sinner in a five-set semi-final to get there, and made the Wimbledon semi-finals in July. What has changed is the margin. In Cincinnati this month he won the first set comfortably and then came apart in the humidity, and afterwards said the thing that everybody heard and nobody wanted to hear: his body reminds him of his age, particularly in heat and heavy air.

Which is the exact set of conditions New York specialises in. Seven matches, best of five, late-August swelter, the hardest surface on the calendar. He opens against Mariano Navone of Argentina, and if the seeds hold he gets Daniil Medvedev in the quarters, in a rematch of the 2023 final he won and the 2021 final he lost.

Watching Djokovic now is a slightly different experience from watching him five years ago. You are not waiting to see whether he wins. You are watching a man manage a body that has done more tennis than almost any body in history, and find out how many days in a row he can still make it obey.

The rest of the men worth your evening

The seeding order behind the big names tells you where the tour has arrived: Felix Auger-Aliassime third, Flavio Cobolli fifth, de Minaur sixth, Medvedev seventh, Shelton eighth.

Auger-Aliassime reached the semi-finals here last year and has a section that opens up nicely for him. Shelton won in Canada and serves the biggest ball in the draw. Arthur Fils, who won Cincinnati a fortnight ago and looked like a different player doing it, is a live threat in the bottom half. Medvedev, who won this title in 2021 and has been sliding ever since, is exactly the kind of player who finds one more fortnight in himself when the surface suits.

If the seeds hold, the quarter-finals read Zverev against de Minaur, Auger-Aliassime against Cobolli, Djokovic against Medvedev, Alcaraz against Shelton. The seeds will not hold. They never do here.

Sabalenka and the history nobody has touched

The women's draw has a headline all of its own. Aryna Sabalenka has won the last two US Opens. A third in a row would make her the first woman to do it since Serena Williams took three straight from 2012 to 2014, and the list of people who have managed it in the modern era is short enough to recite over one coffee.

She is the top seed and she opens against Camila Osorio. The complication is form. Sabalenka started this year in a hurry, but the middle of the season went sideways, and she comes into New York with a record since April that looks nothing like a player marching towards history. Her defence of the title reads as slightly wobbly, which is a strange sentence to write about somebody who has won this event two years running.

Her section is not brutal. Linda Noskova, seeded sixth and now a Wimbledon champion carrying that new weight around, is projected to meet her in the quarters, with Jessica Pegula waiting in a possible semi-final. There is a route here. Whether Sabalenka is in the right frame of mind to walk it is the question of her fortnight. Her form and her season are laid out on her player page.

The bottom half is a small horror film

The other half of the women's draw is where the tournament actually lives.

Elena Rybakina is seeded second and could meet Naomi Osaka, seeded 13th and a two-time champion here, in the fourth round. That is a last-16 match with two major winners in it, which tells you everything about how the numbers have compressed. Coco Gauff, seeded fourth and the 2024 champion, is projected to face Mirra Andreeva in the quarters, and Iga Swiatek, the eighth seed and the 2022 champion, is in the same half. Karolina Muchova, seventh, is loose in there too.

Five former champions are in this draw: Sabalenka, Gauff, Swiatek, Osaka and Emma Raducanu, who won it in 2021 in the most improbable fortnight of the century. Four of them are stacked in the same half.

If you want a story that has nothing to do with the usual names, look for Alexandra Eala. The 21-year-old is seeded 17th, the highest a Filipino singles player has ever been seeded at a major, and she opens against a qualifier. She has spent two years turning firsts into routine: first Filipina to win a main-draw match at a Slam, first to win a WTA title, first into the world top 20. A seeding means something practical as well as symbolic, because it keeps the top players away from her until the third round.

What the fortnight actually looks like

Play starts on Sunday 30 August and runs to the men's final on Sunday 13 September, with the women's final on the Saturday. Fifteen days, seven rounds, two weeks of your evenings if you are in Europe and want to lose some sleep for a good cause.

The money has moved again. The 2026 tournament carries a total purse of 108 million dollars, a rise of around 20 percent on last year, which makes it the richest event in the sport's history. Each singles champion takes 5.5 million dollars. More interesting, if you care about the people you have never heard of, is the bottom of the sheet: a first-round loser earns 140,000 dollars, up more than a quarter on last year. That is a year of coaching, flights and physiotherapy for a player ranked in the 90s, paid for by two hours of work on court 14 in front of 300 people. The prize money argument in tennis is usually framed around champions. It should be framed around that number.

There are 32 players in the main draw this week who were not supposed to be there at all. Qualifying ran from Monday to Thursday at Flushing Meadows, three rounds in four days in the worst of the late-August heat, and it produced 16 men and 16 women who now have a Grand Slam first round and the cheque that comes with it. For most of them this is not a stepping stone to a title run. It is a fortnight that pays for the rest of the season, a locker room they will not see again until January, and one shot at a seeded player on a court with cameras on it.

Watch one of those matches early in the week if you can find one. They are played with a different kind of desperation from the ones in the stadium, in front of a few hundred people who have wandered over because the queue for the show court was too long, and they are frequently the best tennis of the day. The qualifiers who came through this week have already won three matches to get here. Whoever they meet on Sunday or Monday has had a week of practice courts and press duty.

The first week is the good week, and casual viewers get this backwards. Everyone tunes in for the second Saturday, but the first four days are where the tournament is decided: sixteen matches happening at once, a seed going down on an outside court while the stadium plays a mismatch, the crowd wandering in from the food village with a drink in hand and no idea they are about to watch a 20-year-old play the match of their life. If you are new to all of this, our guide to watching tennis covers the rhythm of a Slam day, and the US Open tournament guide has the history and the practical details.

Why an open draw is better television

There is a version of tennis fandom that wants certainty: the best player wins, the hierarchy holds, order is restored on the final Sunday. It is satisfying in the way a well-run railway is satisfying.

This is not that tournament. The number one is at home with a knee that will not settle. The defending champion has been off the tour since spring and could be brilliant or badly rusty, possibly both in the same match. The top seed has been a Grand Slam champion for exactly one summer. The most decorated player in history is 39 and negotiating with the weather. On the women's side, half the former champions in the sport are crammed into one half of the draw.

That is not a flaw in the fortnight. That is the fortnight. Draws like this one produce the matches people still talk about in ten years, precisely because nobody could have called them in advance.

So do this: find the draw sheet, look at it properly once before Sunday, pick two players from outside the top eight and follow them. Not the favourites, who will be on television whatever you do. Somebody in the middle of the sheet with a difficult opener and a run in them. By Wednesday one of them will be gone and the other will have a match you did not expect to care about, and you will be shouting at a stranger in a stadium 3,000 miles away.

The sheet that came out on Thursday will look nothing like this in a week. That is exactly why it is worth reading now.